In a work context, for me at least, this class of reply can actually be pretty useful. It indicates somebody already minimally investigated a thing and may have at least some information about it, but they're hedging on certainty by letting me know "the robots say."
It's a huge asterisk to avoid stating something as a fact, but indicates something that could/should be explored further.
(This would be nonsense if they sent me an email or wrote an issue up this way or something, but in an ad-hoc conversation it makes sense to me)
I think this is different than on HN or other message boards, it's not really used by people to hedge here, if they don't actually personally believe something to be the case (or have a question to ask) why are they posting anyway? No value there.
Yeah if the person doing it is smart I would trust they had the reasonable prompt and ruled out flagrant BS answers. Sometimes the key thing is just to know the name of the thing for the answer. It's equally as good/annoying as reporting what Google search gives for the answer. I guess I assume mostly people will do the AI query/search and then decide to share the answer based on how good or useful it seems.
> can actually be pretty useful. It indicates somebody already minimally investigated a thing
Every time this happens to me at work one of two things happens:
1) I know a bit about the topic, and they're proudly regurgitating an LLM about an aspect of the topic we didn't discuss last time. They think they're telling me something I don't know, while in reality they're exposing how haphazard their LLM use was.
2) I don't know about the topic, so I have to judge the usefulness of what they say based on all the times that person did scenario Number 1.
It's a huge asterisk to avoid stating something as a fact, but indicates something that could/should be explored further.
(This would be nonsense if they sent me an email or wrote an issue up this way or something, but in an ad-hoc conversation it makes sense to me)
I think this is different than on HN or other message boards, it's not really used by people to hedge here, if they don't actually personally believe something to be the case (or have a question to ask) why are they posting anyway? No value there.